I'm saying that, when you start claiming that it's someone's choice whether they should have health insurance or not, you can easily turn that around to claim that it's someone's choice whether they should make a lot of money or not.

(Personally, I think taxes should be lower at the low end and higher at the high end, so unless you're making a good salary you literally pay nothing. And then it really is your choice.

No, it doesn't. It skims off the most profitable citizens to provide for the most unlucky citizens.

If you don't want to be skimmed off, you have the right to simply not make money and starve. That's your unalienable right. You're never, ever forced to work.

But it turns out that enough people like working, and like profit, and like toys, and they can skim off the ones who like to work in order to provide for the ones who can't work. See? No force involved.

I wouldn't. Have you even been following the news lately? Politicians are corrupt. Judges are corrupt. Lawyers are corrupt. Companies are corrupt. Everyone is corrupt.

The instant you let people censor discussion based on what's "correct" is the instant that you start giving companies gargantuan legal and financial incentives to define "correctness". And they're going to do that anyway, but now they're going to step that up by an order of magnitude.

Freedom of speech is simple, unarguable, and largely ungamable. If you say something in your own venue, then allow people to read it, it's absolutely permitted.

Freedom of correctness is absolutely begging for people to game the system to influence the definition of "correctness".

I trust the judicial process about as far as I can throw it.

The problem with "freedom of correctness" is how many so-called "correct" things later turn out to be incredible lies. Correctness requires someone who can objectively judge whether something is correct, and pretty much the entire history of the world is a repeated, blatant demonstration that nobody really knows what is objectively "correct" or not until - at best - a few decades down the road.

I'd fall, and once I impacted the ground, I'd stop.

What an easy question. It'd be a lot more difficult if I had to get to the moon first, or land safely.

(Yes, that's how I'd answer . . . though likely in more flowery language, with enough technical details to make it clear that, if I really wanted to talk about building a rocket ship, I could.)

Good luck trying to find a food product that isn't covered in bacteria, dead or alive.

The problem is that not all programmers are perfect, and not all programmers are even very good. Sometimes you get a minor revision of a library which turns out to have unexpectedly major differences. And boom.

Microsoft is trying to solve the problem, not shunt the problem only people who have already proven incapable of solving it.

Tap water, however, costs a whole hell of a lot less. Even if you run it through a filter.

You're confusing two very different things. "Pay attention to the user's behavior" and "listen to what the user asks for".

The first is always valuable. Seeing what users do is just plain good. You should be doing that. You should absolutely be doing that.

The second, however, is a frequent mistake. Users don't know what they want. They know what they want to do, and they either know they can't do it or they know how they used to be able to do it, but the ideas they come up with to fix that issue tend to range the gamut from "barely acceptable" to "horrible".

Any change you make to an existing UI - *any change whatsoever* - will result in a storm of people calling for blood. No matter how good the idea is, no matter how good the change is, people will scream for it to be changed back. If you want to create a good UI, at some point you just have to ignore this. People yell for reversion, you tell them "no", and a few months down the line you find out if you made the right call or not.

You might think he made the wrong decision here, but "listening to the users" has absolutely nothing to do with real user experience testing.

Actually, WoW does all player motion on the client, which is why speedhacks and flyhacks and all other sort of movement hacks work. It's been a recurring problem for them with regards to cheat protection - as far as anyone can tell, the WoW servers do absolutely no position verification of any sort, and people can fly around at supersonic speed for quite a while before the GMs catch on.

EVE does indeed bounce every command off the server - the client is little more than a dumb terminal (with, admittedly, a complicated buggy window manager attached.)

So negotiate with the artists for songs. If the songwriters don't give artists songs, the artists don't have new songs to play. Put it in the contract, make the artists and labels sign it. That's what contracts are for. Don't try to change contracts after the fact when you get greedy and see how much money is slipping through your fingers.

Apparently, the music industry can't obtain the fees through negotiations

Here's how I see this conversation going.

ASCAP> Give us lots of money!
Apple> You're already getting lots of money.
ASCAP> We want *more* money!
Apple> No.
ASCAP> We *demand* more money!
Apple> No.
ASCAP> If you don't give us more money, we'll take our music off your service!
Apple> No you won't, and we both know it.
ASCAP> WAAAAH GIVE US MORE MONEY

C'mon. If they wanted the extra fees so bad, they'd take their music off. Obviously they don't - they just want the government to step in when their own demands for money fell flat.

Why don't they make their own music distributor? Oh, that's right, because that takes work, and they don't want to do work. They just want free money.

I feel so sorry for them.

I hope you're never in charge of any serious software package, because that would flatten some rather important webpages.

Except that it does. In fact, it did between me making that response and this reply. It might not crash for you, in which case you're lucky, but for me it's somewhat frequent.

And yes, I have 150 tabs open spread across 15 windows, and don't really want to change my work habits to accommodate a flaky piece of software. Firefox should deal with this properly, and right now, it doesn't.

(I've never gotten a memory warning from it, and it seems to gradually use more RAM over time - not like it used to, but it slowly crawls up towards 2gb over time. Once it hits around 1.6gb according to Windows it melts down shortly, I'm assuming this is it hitting the 2gb barrier.)

I think you just invented America's current employment model.